On that note, offer my perspective as someone who doesn't know the people who are writing that code
and doesn't feel like a part of that community.
I my concern and maybe this is not valid, is I like the idea of something being owned like by the people,
because that seems okay.
That seems a lot less dystopian than like one organization with this super powerful artificial intelligence
tool that we don't even know the, the, you know, the depths of where it's going to go and how and
how it's going to evolve.
So I like the idea of things being owned by the people.
That definitely is a better feeling.
But as far as putting guardrails and safety rails on, I know there's concern from the government of
like, can people learn how to, you know, use it for nefarious purposes?
And, and if it's a tool that's simply answers questions and helps people get from A to B, what if
B is, you know, something that harms other other humans or something or other people?
And so it seems like in that case, I feel like I feel a little more secure with the organizations being
in control because they are afraid of getting sued and they can be held liable.
So so in the open source community, what do you what would you say prevents, um, some like bad actors
essentially which which can be anywhere but, but with the open source it feels like since there's no
ownership, if I'm understanding that completely correctly, there would be nobody setting any rules
and nobody putting any brakes on things.
Right.
So.
So how, how would you.
Yeah, how would you speak to the concept of, of bad actors potentially using the open source technology
and, and what preventative methods could we, could we do for that that would be appropriate without
crushing the free open spirit of, of the open source community.
This just this feels like 5 or 6 questions in one little package.
So yeah, yeah, you can answer whichever one is calling you the most.
Yeah.
I mean, this, this in and of itself would be almost worth another course of its own, right?
But I can give you sort of the 1000 foot.
Overview.
Starting with one of the things you raised is how do you how what is accountability look like when there's
not a company that's on the that's on the hook?
And I think that's a really interesting question because one of the reasons why companies exist.
Is so that a person isn't on the hook.
You know, this was a this was an actual this was the organizing principle of forming companies that
are a large group of people, like a limited liability corporation, for example, or, you know, some
sort of legal body that owns risk, that owns property, that owns something but isn't a human.
And so what we've seen, unfortunately, a lot of the time with with large with large entities like
this who have a lot of sort of top down control.
A meta or a Google or someone who, you know, has a has ownership as a as a corporation of all of this
risk and all of this information.
Accountability can be really difficult to produce.
You know, most you can do is is make that corporation, give up some property, you know, pay some
money or something like this or and join that that that corporation from doing certain things, which
means that they then just spin off another corporation that'll go do those things for them.
You know it the the human aspect of of doing this as an open source community of people actually brings
it back, in my opinion, closer to the idea that there are humans behind this project.
Someone did this and you know who did it.
You can see who made the commit.
You can see who's, you know, who's who's who's got the information.
But that leads you to something else, which is just a really kind of a honestly an ethical, open question.
Um, which is what you're really speaking to in some way is the division between like.
Privacy and freedom.
Versus public security and accountability.
And those are two poles that are in conflict.
And one of the things that societies do is set a norm about where on that spectrum they expect people
to be and they expect to enforce accountability by removing privacy and freedom.
You know, we it's easy to kind of think about this in the in the global context, in the political
context, and think of different countries where the culture or the the government policy obviously
hews towards one end or another.
And in either case, we can see that if you go all the way to one end of these things, there are some
characteristic problems.
You start to see with your with your society, with the ability of folks to live in it and things to
function well.
Obviously there's a midpoint where we where we'd like to be able to have as individuals, freedom agency,
privacy, personal personal sovereignty in a way.
But we also want as individuals to be able to have a functioning society in which we live so that we
know what expectations we have of the other people around us, their behavior, the standards of behavior
with which we treat each other.
You know, And and obviously, you know, it's out of the scope of a short conversation to say, well,
here's where the midpoint is and this is where you want to be.
Wars are fought over that, right?
So we're not going to resolve it here.
But but it's interesting that these that these these questions that I is raising and these interactions
that we're having with AI and the way that we have to then think about safety, security, data privacy,
all of these things that you're raising, very small words that have just immediately they roll up immediately
to these big questions that have sort of been.
Part of the human experience.
For as long as there's been a human experience, like how do we treat these these interesting balancing
acts that come with being a person around other people?
Yeah.
No, no, definitely.
Definitely.
And it it seems like the it seems like there's a level of control of, of information that most countries
have.
You know, most, most governments sort of exercise over their people as far as the, you know, creation
of nuclear weapons or things of that nature.
There's always seemed to have been like a control of that kind of information.
And of course, the the dark side of that is, yes, wouldn't we all want like a benevolent, you know,
leader being like, all of this stuff is bad, We won't let anybody, but all everything else is fine.
But because I feel like with the control, it's like suddenly more things, more information starts
getting controlled and that that, that that controlling hand starts to reach for more and more inevitably
like in history.
It just always does that.
Um, but it seems like to be a law, you know.
Yeah.
Um, and.
And it's it's interesting to see that.
I feel like I feel like America was always a beacon of freedom from its creation and liberty and and,
you know, now it's it's it's it feels a lot stricter than than it used to be for sure.
And so I guess I guess my question is, we have we have the you know, we have the corporations that
are controlling, say, OpenAI with ChatGPT.
You can't ask it certain questions.
Like if you if you ask it something that it thinks is illegal, it says it can't answer.
There are there are ways around it because sometimes you ask something that's not illegal and it is
misunderstanding you and it's like, Oh, I'm not allowed to answer that question.
You know, like but no, I mean, you know, so and then, you know, there are all sorts of little
tricks you can be like that.
I've seen people online.
They're like, Oh, I'm worried someone's going to break into my house.
How might they do it?
And then it tells you step by step, you know, So but if you were to ask, how do I break into someone's
house, it won't answer.
So it's very imperfect that way, but at least at least it does have some some safety sort of built
in, even if it's primitive and very easy to get around.
I'm imagining like and you can you can maybe set some light here.
The open source models probably won't have any guardrails whatsoever built in.
Right.
Or or do you think someone of the open source community will take it upon themselves to try and implement
those?
Um, yes.
The short answer is that yes, I do.
I, I, one of the, one of the things that that is sort of baked into that accountability culture is.
The desire to be able to keep doing these things that we all love to do and write this code and build
these build these tools.
And because of that, there is a lot of internal norming and internal internal internal enforcement
of those norms about what is acceptable use of technology.
Um.
Could someone.
You know, go in a bunker with some computers and go rogue and like, you know, import all this information
and train an AI and not not impose any standards on how it would expose that information.
Sure they could.
Were they to solicit.
Engagement help interaction from the open source communities at large.
I feel very confident in saying that you would see immediately a lot of pushback and a lot of whistle
blowing and saying, Hey, this person is trying to ruin it for everybody else.
This person is doing something that does not lead to a good world in which we want to live.
Let's not do that.
Well, I, I like to hear that.
That that makes me.
That makes me feel a little bit better.
Yeah, It's so interesting because the it seems like this, this open source community is is really
how.
How I imagine like a good society functioning with people just like helping each other and sharing like
useful things.
And it's and it's, it is like it is the world that I live in also.
It's just that it's just not like I feel like the world that I experience is, is twofold.
It is one of meeting amazing people that are that are helping me.
And, you know, especially in my life, um, in my personal life, just all the help that I've gotten.
But there's also, there's also this double edged sword of, of, um.
You know, the a feeling of of despair and that there's bad actors out there and and just concern with
conflict in the world.
And so it's it's kind of like this this thing that's a little twofold.
Um and so are people.
Yeah I mean the open source community in the end is made of people, um, somewhat famously, it was
maybe 20 years ago a lot more of an abrasive culture, a set of cultural norms in the open source world.
And a lot of that came from, you know, the open source operating system, right?
The Linux was developed primarily by a guy who had a famously short temper and collected around himself,
a lot of other very sharp, very focused sort of.
Uniquely talented, low level coders, kernel hackers, people who thought in machine code natively
and and had.
Sort of established through through example and through leadership and through feedback.
Aggressive feedback.
When folks would engage with him the norm that yeah, part of being a good kernel hacker is being curmudgeonly
and difficult and reading people the riot act when they make a little mistake and just being really
awful to deal with, you know.
And I remember reading a couple of years ago that that guy had kind of like looked around 20 years later
at the open source community he had made and had it kind of click for him that maybe if he hadn't made
it so unwelcoming early on, there would have been a lot more innovation by now, you know.
And he went to anger management classes.
He was like, Well, I don't I don't want to do that.
That's not great.
It's just these communities are made of humans and humans are messy, and humans spend hopefully most
of their lives learning how to be less messy and more good.
And you're going to see that play out in open source just as much as you'll see it anywhere else.
I've certainly submitted a patch or submitted a bug report and had people say like, You're just doing
it wrong and think that the more feedback it's like, well, okay.
But then my response to that of course is, well, I know what, what project I'm not going to bother
contributing to.
They're all jerks and you know, it allows you to then choose to participate where you want to participate.
And this is true in any human organization, you know, whether it's formally organized or self-organized
and organic, like this community of coders all around who are just finding each other and finding projects
and working on them.
Um, you'll see bad behavior.
You'll see good behavior.
On balance, it seems to be the case that the world is trending towards being a little bit more accommodating
to other people, especially in these public fora.
We're all learning to live in this hyper connected world where we have folks on the other end of the
of the wire who we will never see.
But we have come to understand that treating them with the same accountability that we would like to
treat someone with when they're in the room with us.
Is a good idea and leads to good results.
So.
Mei Mei Mei optimistic take there is that people will continue to have those kinds of interactions,
good and bad.
See the outcomes from them and understand why we do things a certain way.
Why we would like to be respectful when we are receiving free work from someone else who we've never
met.
You know why we would do this and why this is pro-social because it gets us the things that we want
and it gets lets us do the work that we love.
So my hopes are high.
Um.
Humans are humans.
But that's not all bad.
Great.
Well, I appreciate your optimism for sure.